OVP: A Star is Born (1976)

Film: A Star is Born (1976)

Stars: Barbra Streisand, Kris Kristofferson, Gary Busey

Director: Frank Pierson

Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Original Song-"Evergreen," Cinematography, Scoring, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Kris Kristofferson: click here to learn more about Mr. Kristofferson (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Few films live in such storied annals as A Star is Born, a film that has been told 4-5 times depending on how you handle What Price Hollywood?.  It is the quintessential Hollywood story, the public name-check when we talk about the entertainment industry.  But specific to our film today, few productions have the kinds of legendary tale as that which comes from the 1976 A Star is Born, one of the most infamous film shoots in movie history.  Written by the journalist It Couple of the 1970's (John Gregory Dunne & Joan Didion), the shoot involved pretty much everyone hating each other.  Kris Kristofferson, then a huge star, hadn't been the first choice for the film (Streisand wanted Elvis Presley, who honestly would've been an interesting choice had that come about even though Kristofferson is the better actor of the two), and by the end of the production loathed both his leading lady and director Frank Pierson.  You've got Barbra Streisand having an affair with colorful 1970's mega-producer Jon Peters (who had just gotten a divorce from Lesley Ann Warren), and using her position as the most powerful person on the set to run roughshod over director Pierson, including getting final cut which may explain how the ending ends with a seven-minute long shot of Streisand.  A production where all of the cast isn't speaking (except the ones who are fucking each other), by the end of it can sometimes become a grand situation if the movie is good (look at Hell's Angels, now considered Howard Hughes' finest movie), but if it sucks, it becomes a Don't Worry Darling-style fiasco.  And A Star is Born sucks.

(Spoilers Ahead) This story is as engrained in Hollywood lore as you can get, so I don't know that I need a spoiler alert, but for those of you somehow unfamiliar, this is the story of John Norman Howard (Kristofferson), a washed-up rock star, who is more familiar with the bottle than the Billboard charts by the time the movie opens.  He meets, at a bar, a young singer named Esther Hoffman (Streisand), who is clearly a talent, and becomes smitten with her.  Eventually, he's producing one of her albums, and she's clearly headed to the top of the charts, and they even get married.  But there's a problem-John's demons are not only still there, but they're exacerbated by his jealousy over his wife's success, and she wants him to join in on it, rather than letting him slip into the background or not fight for what he's got.  In the end, this is the marriage (and John's) undoing, as he dies in a drunk driving accident, though unlike some of the other movies, it's not entirely clear that this is intentional or not.  Esther is now alone, but a fully-transcendent star, one who understands that she'll forever be linked with the man who fell before her.

This has been told very well (Judy Garland, Constance Bennett), solidly (Janet Gaynor), and poorly (Lady Gaga) before.  But this is the worst of the versions, because even with the others, specifically 2018's (I don't think Lady Gaga has proven capable of being a dramatic actress, and I think she's bad in the movie when she's not singing, but she gets coverage because Bradley Cooper is good and also because Gaga is a strong singer who gets one truly fantastic scene with "Shallow") there was something crackling between the two lead actors.  Gaga & Cooper, March & Gaynor, and especially Mason & Garland...there's heat.  But this film has zilch sexual chemistry between Streisand & Kristofferson, to the point where you genuinely don't understand why he fell for her.  This makes the film over-long, boring, and honestly...the leads give bad performances, particularly Streisand, who plays Esther less as an organic character onscreen and more as Barbra Streisand as herself.  Nothing about this works; honestly, I read a comment about how this feels an hour longer than the Garland version even though it's much shorter, and that summarizes my feelings exactly.

The film won four Oscar nominations, but it only earned one of them.  The sound is fine, but not spectacular (the concert scenes in Nashville a year earlier did a much better job of giving you a sense of talking at a performance, and of framing the musical numbers), and the cinematography is a similar situation, needlessly glossy & framed in a way that stops it from being romantic or creative.  The nomination for Best Scoring makes sense given the sales on the soundtrack were insane (I'm surprised it didn't win), but with one exception, none of the songs are either any good or performed organically-unlike Gaga's A Star is Born (where Gaga as a songwriter wrote plausible hits), it's not clear why the public latched onto either John or Esther as performers...save for "Evergreen."  One of the most iconic numbers of Streisand's discography, the song becomes the love theme for the movie, and while the movie's romantic overtones are never believable, lost in a song "as soft as an easy chair" you'd be forgiven for assuming this is a classic (because "Evergreen" is).